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Snowden Induced Mea Culpas
by John Young 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

Comsec experts should not be surprised at the Snowden revelations about NSA so far, most of which are venerable. What is surprising is their seemingly exaggerated surprise because many of them worked at or ran firms which were known to be heavily involved with official spying through dual-use technology and dual-purpose contracts. With USG and world governments, with banks and telecoms, with comsec, software and anti-virus firms, with universities and research institutes, with FOI organizations and public interest advisory boards, with vulture investors, TED and Aspen, with revolving doors among goverment, industry, education, journalism, banking and Wall Street, with RAND, NRL, the national laboratories, to name a few. In most instances these dual roles were not hidden. Or were they? What might be troubling about Snowden's possible revelations that is causing exaggerated surprise of these experts is the disclosure that the dual-uses and dual-roles in spying were more extensive than has been made public. That has been protected by highest secrecy about to be breached, not about the spy agencies but those used to camouflage and assist the spying by downplaying its pervasiveness by selling protection that could never be wholly effective, that the cybersec game was as rigged as gambling. That the backdoors, vulnerabilities, holes, faults, and errors were more craftily hidden and exploited with the complicity of the best and brightest while they deluded the the public for market share and FOI fame. That it was a charade to agitate for more security and privacy while undermining them. That Snowden has the documents about that ancient betrayal and will at some point make them available. That it would be wise to get ahead of this exposure by rushing to claim the spying has been greater than even we experts knew and comsec is a fraud by design. Crypto-AG the norm.

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filesharing is terrism
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/354407,nz-police-affidavits-show-use-of-prism… NZ police affidavits show use of PRISM for surveillance By Juha Saarinen on Aug 23, 2013 5:46 AM (20 hours ago) Filed under Security Police affidavits related to the raid on Kim Dotcom's Mega mansion appear to show that New Zealand police and spy agencies are able to tap directly into United States surveillance systems such as PRISM to capture email and other traffic. The discovery was made by blogger Keith Ng who wrote on his On Point blog that the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) requested assistance from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the country's signals intelligence unit, which is charge of surveilling the Pacific region under the Five-Eyes agreement. A list of so-called selectors or search terms were provided to GCSB by the police [PDF, redacted] for the surveillance of emails and other data traffic generated by Dotcom and his Megaupload associates. 'Selectors' is the term used for the National Security Agency (NSA) XKEYSCORE categorisation system that Australia and New Zealand contribute to and which was leaked by Edward Snowden as part of his series of PRISM revelations. Some "selectors of interest" have been redacted out, but others such as Kim Dotcom's email addresses, the mail proxy server used for some of the accounts and websites, remain in the documents. Megaupload co-founders Bram van der Kolk and Sven Ecthernach was were also targeted for electronic surveillance, ditto Dotcom's wife Mona. Dotcom's mansion was raided by NZ police last year for crimes related to online piracy, based on indictments filed in the US. One note on the reports generated from the surveillance points to the system used capturing real-time traffic. Several of the documents are classified as "CONFIDENTIAL COMINT/NEW ZEALAND EYES ONLY" with one being marked as "SECRET/COMINT/REL TO NZL, AUS, CAN, GBR, USA". The spying on Dotcom, his wife and van der Kolk was deemed to be illegal as all three are residents of New Zealand and the GCSB is precluded by current law from intercepting their communications. In the United States, declassified government documents have been released to the Electronic Frontier Fourndation that show the NSA operates an eavesdropping program that has direct access to internet communications. The documents are part of a statement by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which berates the NSA for misleading the tribunal on the extent of domestic spying on innocent people, saying such collection was unconstitutional. Copyright © iTnews.com.au . All rights reserved.

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Re: [cryptography] Reply to Zooko (in Markdown)
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Zooko Wilcox-OHearn <zooko(a)leastauthority.com> ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 15:21:47 +0000 From: Zooko Wilcox-OHearn <zooko(a)leastauthority.com> To: Jon Callas <jon(a)callas.org> Cc: cryptography(a)randombit.net Subject: Re: [cryptography] Reply to Zooko (in Markdown) Dear Jon: Thank you for your kind words and your detailed response. I am going to focus only on the issue that I think is most relevant and urgent for your customers and mine. That urgent issue is: what's the difference between the now-canceled Silent Mail product and the products that you are still offering, such as Silent Text? I don't understand why the Lavabit shutdown and the related domestic surveillance disclosures imply that Silent Mail was unsafe in any way that wouldn't also mean Silent Text is unsafe. Before I go on, I'd like to point out a critical fact that some readers might not be aware of: Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, now claims that he is being threatened with jail time *for having shut down the service*: http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/13/20008036-lavabitcom-owne… This changes the equation, because it means not only can the U.S. federal espionage authorities say "Backdoor all of your customers or close your business.", they can also say "Backdoor all of your customers or go to jail.". As the owner and CEO of a privacy-protecting service (https://LeastAuthority.com) and a U.S. citizen, and as the father of three precious boys who do not want to be separated from me for any length of time, this concerns me greatly. Now, maybe the U.S. espionage authorities wouldn't make that threat again. Maybe Ladar Levison's resistance will teach them that it was a mistake. I don't know, but we have to take into account this possibility for now. Your decision to shutter the Silent Mail product was made because of such possibilities. But your decision to *keep* the Silent Text service (and the others) still operating while shutting down the Silent Mail service would make sense only in the following scenario: Attacker: "We're here to compel you to give us access to the confidential communications of all of your customers." Silent Circle: "But, to do that we would have to change our client — for example, change its random number generator to produce output that we can predict — and then upload a software update to the Apple and Google app stores, and then wait for all of our customers to automatically upgrade to the new version!" Attacker: "Oh, well in that case nevermind." Why do you think that this scenario is plausible? I don't think it is plausible. Instead, I think the conversation would go like this: Silent Circle: "… and then wait for all of our customers to automatically upgrade to the new version!" Attacker: "Okay. Do that." Now, there is a big, complex, and interesting question about how to enable others to *verify* the security of software. It is not impossible, as you suggested. Good progress on enabling independent verification of security is being made, by Whisper Systems (https://whispersystems.org/) my own company LeastAuthority.com, the Tor Project (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-cyberwar-and…) Gitian (https://gitian.org/) Debian (https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds) and Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Release_process) But before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to facilitate verification of end-to-end security, I want to hammer on the first issue: before going forth to try to improve an issue, we should first admit to our current customers and to the public that the issue exists. We shouldn't mislead our customers into thinking that they are safe from something that they are not. Silent Circle's closure of Silent Mail for the stated reason is inconsistent with its continued operation of the Silent Text service. The stated reason was that the US federal government could compel Silent Circle to backdoor the Silent Mail service. That same reason applies today to the Silent Text service and the other services that Silent Circle is still operating. To be clear, I'm not asking you to shut down your other services. I think that would be a loss for everyone. And I'm not asking you to magically fix all of the problems by tomorrow. I know, in part from your detailed letter, that you are currently working on improving some parts of your process, and I think that there are other techniques that you could use (including licensing your source code as Free and Open Source software) that would help. But I understand the challenges of running a business, actively serving customers, and performing sophisticated engineering all at once. I know that improvement takes time. What I'm asking you to do is to *be clear* with your customers and with the public about the current limitations. Currently, the US federal espionage agencies can compel Silent Circle to secretly provide access to all of Silent Circle's customers' private communications. That's too bad. But it is fixable! But to fix it starts with admitting what the problem is. Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Service Rep https://LeastAuthority.com Freedom matters. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [HacDC:Byzantium] Bitmessage?
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from The Doctor <drwho(a)virtadpt.net> ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 10:19:30 -0400 From: The Doctor <drwho(a)virtadpt.net> To: Byzantium(a)hacdc.org Subject: Re: [HacDC:Byzantium] Bitmessage? Reply-To: Byzantium(a)hacdc.org Organization: Virtual Adept Networks, Unlimited User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130514 Thunderbird/17.0.6 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08/15/2013 03:48 PM, Moritz Bartl wrote: > The main reason is that, despite people requesting it from the > author multiple times over the course of years, he has yet to > produce any kind of specification other than the code itself. It appears that Bitmessage is completely hosed. http://secupost.net/2325962497/bitmessage-security - -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/ PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "I have a choice again: two hands that are both mine." --The Six Million Dollar Man -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlIXb3IACgkQO9j/K4B7F8FXfwCg75vnhkmB3o/XLEIz6hjscQlg c/cAoOu4h9rXW5ZEKVBM/gJEoEvoYCoV =4l6n -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Byzantium (Emergency Mesh Networking)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Byzantium+unsubscribe(a)hacdc.org. To post to this group, send email to Byzantium(a)hacdc.org. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/group/Byzantium/. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/groups/opt_out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [liberationtech] Announcing Scramble.io
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from phreedom(a)yandex.ru ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 15:53:42 +0300 From: phreedom(a)yandex.ru To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Announcing Scramble.io User-Agent: KMail/4.10.5 (Linux/3.9.11; KDE/4.10.5; i686; ; ) Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> > One difficult problem in public-key encryption is key exchange: how to get > a recipient's public key and know it's really theirs. > My plan is to make make your email the hash of your public key. > For example, my address is *nqkgpx6bqscslher(a)scramble.io* > (I borrowed this idea from Tor Hidden Services.) This is what we need everyone to adopt. Your ID = your public key hash and not an account on some server you don't control. Glad to see more people adopt this idea. Any chance of interoperability with other projects with similar aims and ideas like Cables? [1] [1] http://dee.su/cables -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [liberationtech] Open Whisper Systems' neat asynch FPS "pre-keying"
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from elijah <elijah(a)riseup.net> ----- Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 23:46:10 -0700 From: elijah <elijah(a)riseup.net> To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Open Whisper Systems' neat asynch FPS "pre-keying" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130803 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> On 08/22/2013 08:09 PM, Tom Ritter wrote: >> https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ Since these >> key exchange parts are ephemeral, recording ciphertext traffic >> doesn’t help a would-be adversary, since there is no durable key >> for them to compromise in the future. > > I disagree. PFS traffic today protected with 1024-bit DH will be > readable in 10 years, if not sooner, to organizations like the NSA. > In twice that time it may be cheap enough to be decryptable on a > mass scale. Well, to be fair to moxie, TextSecure uses a modified OTR that uses ECC, afaik. > Anyway, that's a nit. My first thought is that the nastiest part of > this protocol is that Bob (a client) is trusting the server to give > it legitimate keys for Alice (the other client.) The server can lie, > and hand out fradulent keys (I'll call one KeyF as opposed to a legit > one KeyA). I think this criticism is also a bit unfair. The scheme of using generating prekeys for later key agreement is pretty clever. With this, moxie is not trying to solve, or claiming to have solved, the larger problem of binding user account to public key. For the binding problem, he is completely punting, and relying on a central authority, afaik, which is awful and horrible for all the reasons you state. But the key agreement part is cooool. If you could solve the binding problem some other way, then moxie's prekey approach could be used for all kinds of things, even email. For the user public key binding problem, you have a proposal [0], I have a proposal [1], Paul Wouters has a proposal [2], there are probably several more people on the list with proposals too. One of them will probably work, eventually. And when one does, the prekey approach to key agreement could come in very handy. -elijah [0] unpublished UEE protocol [1] https://leap.se/en/nicknym [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wouters-dane-openpgp/ -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [silk] Collateral damage
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Udhay Shankar N <udhay(a)pobox.com> ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 08:12:25 +0530 From: Udhay Shankar N <udhay(a)pobox.com> To: silklist(a)lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Collateral damage User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: silklist(a)lists.hserus.net On 20-Aug-13 10:57 PM, Dave Long wrote: > Steganets ("none of you has ever seen a dead donkey") might be a little > less obvious than darknets (and the normally abysmal S/N ratio of social > networks may actually provide decent channel bandwidth?) Interesting example of a darknet: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid-internet-mesh/ Greek community creates an off-the-grid Internet By Joe Kloc on August 19, 2013 Email Follow http://twitter.com/joekloc In an effort to buck the expensive rates of unreliable corporate telecom companies, a community in Athens, Greece has created its own private Internet. Built from a network of wireless rooftop antennas, the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) now has more than 1,000 members. Data moves “through” the AWMN mesh up to 30 times faster than it does on the telecom-provided Internet. According to Mother Jones, this off-the-grid community has become so popular in Athens and on nearby islands that it has developed its own Craigslist-esque classifieds service as well as blogs and an internal search engine. "It's like a whole other web," AWMN user Joseph Bonicioli told the magazine. "It's our network, but it's also a playground." The AWMN began in 2002 in response to the poor Internet service provided by traditional telecommunications companies in Athens. However, the past few years have illustrated another use for these citizen-run meshes: preserving the democratic values of the Internet. As the Internet has become a ubiquitous presence in day-to-day life, governments around the world have sought to control it. In 2011 for example, when former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak found out that protesters were organizing on Facebook, he commanded the country’s Internet service providers to shut down access, denying 17 million Egyptians access to the Web for days. Later that year in the U.S., the city of San Francisco temporarily shut down cellphone service in its transit system to stop a protest. As Bonicioli told Mother Jones, "When you run your own network, nobody can shut it down." These DIY meshes are also used to provide Internet in places major telecom companies can’t—or won’t—reach. For example, one was constructed last year in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy knocked out resident’s access to the networks of major Internet service providers. Similarly, Guifi, the largest mesh in the world, was built to address spotty Internet service in rural Spain. It has over 21,000 members. Meshes have taken on new relevance in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the agency’s massive Internet surveillance programs. It is estimated (albeit roughly) that the NSA touches as much as half of the world’s Internet communications each day. The agency gains access to much of this information through partnerships with telecom companies that allow the agency to install splitters on their fibre optic Internet cables. Privately run meshes would deny the NSA—and other government intelligence agencies around the world—this access point to Internet data. As the New America Foundation’s Sascha Meinrath told Mother Jones, "We're making infrastructure for anyone who wants to control their own network." -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[tor-dev] Global semi-passive adversary: suggestion of using expanders
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Paul-Olivier Dehaye <paul-olivier.dehaye(a)math.uzh.ch> ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 03:08:59 +0200 From: Paul-Olivier Dehaye <paul-olivier.dehaye(a)math.uzh.ch> To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-dev] Global semi-passive adversary: suggestion of using expanders Reply-To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Hello, Thank you for working on Tor. I have a suggestion and would appreciate input. Please bear with me as I have a limited understanding of the design of Tor and all the different threats that it is meant to mitigate. Below, a (?) indicates a place where I need some confirmation that my understanding is correct, and N indicates either the number of Tor nodes, the number of end-users, or the amount of traffic (I assume these are all linearly related). As far as I can tell, the main threat by a global passive adversary comes from traffic analysis (?). This attack should become easier as the number of Tor nodes increases (?): Tor uses a clique topology, so the number of edges potentially carrying traffic grows like N^2. A dual way to see this is that not enough mixing can happen around a node for incoming/outgoing edge pairs, bar injecting a huge amount of fake traffic. To compensate, it seems natural to look for a sparse yet highly mixing network topology. Mathematically, those are called expanders [1]. A typical example of a family of expanders would be the Erdos-Renyi model [2], and indeed I have found in the literature suggestions for basing anonymizing protocols on such a model. The analysis in the presence of an active adversary becomes very difficult though. Alternatively, one could use a different method for constructing that expander topology, working "all at once". This comes from recent mathematics research (<= 5 years, certainly not my own, see [3]). The graph is then a Cailey graph [4] in a matrix group (the group is fixed and determined by an approximation to the number of Tor nodes, such as nearest third power of a prime number). In some sense this construction interpolates between mixing chains and Tor, and can be seen as a lot of mixing chains interwoven. In the setting of Tor, constructing the Cailey graph would require making two distributed randomize choices: - a matching of elements of the group to Tor nodes (possibly 2:1 for some Tor nodes) - a small subset of generators for the Cailey graph >From my understanding of security protocols, it should be easy to do these two choices safely and fast, as it amounts to choosing a random element in S_N and filling lots of matrix entries with random elements between 1 and a prime p, with some rejection. Once that is done, the network topology is fully determined, and with very high probability gives an expander. This means that traffic gets mixed up in very few hops. The number of hops needed grows as log N, with a constant that can be mitigated by chosing a large generating set above. This is the only downside I see (apart from difficulty to explain the math behind this): the latency would increase, from 3 in the current protocol to maybe 10 or so. I don't know the details of the behaviour of the constants in the last paragraph, and would appreciate feedback from the list before looking too much into this. Paul Dehaye [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expander_graph [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93R%C3%A9nyi_model [3] http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/245b-notes-1-basic-theory-of-expan… 15 and remark below [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayley_graph _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[cryptopolitics] Is Windows 8 a Trojan horse for the NSA? The German Government thinks so
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Jeffrey Walton <noloader(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 21:05:28 -0400 From: Jeffrey Walton <noloader(a)gmail.com> To: Cryptopolictics Mailing List <cryptopolitics(a)randombit.net> Subject: [cryptopolitics] Is Windows 8 a Trojan horse for the NSA? The German Government thinks so Reply-To: noloader(a)gmail.com http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-trojan-horse-for-ns… The German Government is now deeply suspicious that the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology built into a growing number of Windows 8 PCs and tablets is creating a gigantic back door for NSA surveillance, leaked documents have suggested. Documents from the German Ministry of Economic Affairs obtained by German title Zeit Online (http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2013-08/trusted-computing-microsoft-…) uncover the alleged unease of officials at the direction of version 2.0 of the standard being developed under the auspices of the multi-vendor Trusted Computing Group (TCG). TPM has been marketed as a security technology since its appearance in 2006, but version 2.0 would embed a chip on every PC that has complete control over which programs can and can’t run, a setting that can’t be over-ridden under Windows 8. The chip is also where the cryptographic data is stored for Windows BitLocker and it enables remote administration. ... _______________________________________________ cryptopolitics mailing list cryptopolitics(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptopolitics ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[tt] Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2013
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '13

23 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> ----- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:10:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> To: Transhuman Tech <tt(a)postbiota.org> Subject: [tt] Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2013 Lots of alarming stuff. Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2013 http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1308.html by Bruce Schneier BT Security Futurologist schneier(a)schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. In this issue: * The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership * The NSA is Commandeering the Internet * Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet * News * Book Review: "Rise of the Warrior Cop" * Schneier News * Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing * Counterterrorism Mission Creep ---- The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones. If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google, Microsoft or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other site is hosting them. The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government's intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage. Computers and networks inherently produce data, and our constant interactions with them allow corporations to collect an enormous amount of intensely personal data about us as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we produce this data inadvertently simply by using our phones, credit cards, computers and other devices. Sometimes we give corporations this data directly on Google, Facebook, Apple Inc.'s iCloud and so on in exchange for whatever free or cheap service we receive from the Internet in return. The NSA is also in the business of spying on everyone, and it has realized it's far easier to collect all the data from these corporations rather than from us directly. In some cases, the NSA asks for this data nicely. In other cases, it makes use of subtle threats or overt pressure. If that doesn't work, it uses tools like national security letters. The result is a corporate-government surveillance partnership, one that allows both the government and corporations to get away with things they couldn't otherwise. There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other's laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits. This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect. Here's an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter--because it would only reduce their profits--the market isn't going to protect consumers, either. Our elected officials are often supported, endorsed and funded by these corporations as well, setting up an incestuous relationship between corporations, lawmakers and the intelligence community. The losers are us, the people, who are left with no one to stand up for our interests. Our elected government, which is supposed to be responsible to us, is not. And corporations, which in a market economy are supposed to be responsive to our needs, are not. What we have now is death to privacy--and that's very dangerous to democracy and liberty. The simple answer is to blame consumers, who shouldn't use mobile phones, credit cards, banks or the Internet if they don't want to be tracked. But that argument deliberately ignores the reality of today's world. Everything we do involves computers, even if we're not using them directly. And by their nature, computers produce tracking data. We can't go back to a world where we don't use computers, the Internet or social networking. We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that's how our world works today. Curbing the power of the corporate-private surveillance partnership requires limitations on both what corporations can do with the data we choose to give them and restrictions on how and when the government can demand access to that data. Because both of these changes go against the interests of corporations and the government, we have to demand them as citizens and voters. We can lobby our government to operate more transparently--disclosing the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be a good start --and hold our lawmakers accountable when it doesn't. But it's not going to be easy. There are strong interests doing their best to ensure that the steady stream of data keeps flowing. This essay originally appeared on Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-31/... Corporations collecting data: http://www.schneier.com/essay-324.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-423.html http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/... Corporations cooperating with the NSA: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595202-38/... http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/... How the partnership manifests itself: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-28/... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-30/... Congress attempt to rein in NSA: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/politics/... The death of privacy: https://www.schneier.com/essay-418.html Disclosing FISA opinions: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-09/... ---- The NSA is Commandeering the Internet It turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way. I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight. Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy's life? It's going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they're going to protect you, but they won't. The NSA doesn't care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it's convenient to do so. We're already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They've lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do--and don't do--is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don't care. It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they'll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they're sloppy. They'll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn't have a copy, the next whistleblower will. This is why you have to fight. When it becomes public that the NSA has been hoovering up all of your users' communications and personal files, what's going to save you in the eyes of those users is whether or not you fought. Fighting will cost you money in the short term, but capitulating will cost you more in the long term. Already companies are taking their data and communications out of the US. The extreme case of fighting is shutting down entirely. The secure e-mail service Lavabit did that last week, abruptly. Ladar Levison, that site's owner, wrote on his homepage: "I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision." The same day, Silent Circle followed suit, shutting down their e-mail service in advance of any government strong-arm tactics: "We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now." I realize that this is extreme. Both of those companies can do it because they're small. Google or Facebook couldn't possibly shut themselves off rather than cooperate with the government. They're too large; they're public. They have to do what's economically rational, not what's moral. But they can fight. You, an executive in one of those companies, can fight. You'll probably lose, but you need to take the stand. And you might win. It's time we called the government's actions what they really are: commandeering. Commandeering is a practice we're used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it's happening in peacetime. Vast swaths of the Internet are being commandeered to support this surveillance state. If this is happening to your company, do what you can to isolate the actions. Do you have employees with security clearances who can't tell you what they're doing? Cut off all automatic lines of communication with them, and make sure that only specific, required, authorized acts are being taken on behalf of government. Only then can you look your customers and the public in the face and say that you don't know what is going on--that your company has been commandeered. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently wrote in the "Guardian": "Technology companies: now is the moment when you must answer for us, your users, whether you are collaborators in the US government's efforts to 'collect it all'--our every move on the internet--or whether you, too, are victims of its overreach." So while I'm sure it's cool to have a secret White House meeting with President Obama--I'm talking to you, Google, Apple, AT&T, and whoever else was in the room--resist. Attend the meeting, but fight the secrecy. Whose side are you on? The NSA isn't going to remain above the law forever. Already public opinion is changing, against the government and their corporate collaborators. If you want to keep your users' trust, demonstrate that you were on their side. This essay originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/... Corporations and the NSA surveillance apparatus: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/... http://www.schneier.com/essay-436.html http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/06/... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/... http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/... Companies wanting more disclosure: http://business.time.com/2013/07/18/... Whistleblowing as civil disobedience: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/07/... Cooperating with NSA surveillance costs companies money: http://boingboing.net/2013/08/08/... Lavabit: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/... http://boingboing.net/2013/08/08/... http://lavabit.com/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/09/... Silent Circle: http://silentcircle.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/... Jarvis essay: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/... Tech companies meet with Obama: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/... NSA is a criminal organization: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/... Regaining trust: http://www.schneier.com/essay-435.html Slashdot thread: http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/08/12/1850229/... ---- Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype--owned by Microsoft--was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company's blog to deny it. Turns out that wasn't quite true. Or at least he--or the company's lawyers--carefully crafted a statement that could be defended as true while completely deceiving the reader. You see, Skype wasn't changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users. At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn't collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word "collect," an excuse that didn't even pass the laugh test. As Edward Snowden's documents reveal more about the NSA's activities, it's becoming clear that we can't trust anything anyone official says about these programs. Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no "direct access" to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers. Apple says it's never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that's the internal name of the NSA database. Companies are publishing reports purporting to show how few requests for customer-data access they've received, a meaningless number when a single Verizon request can cover all of their customers. The Guardian reported that Microsoft secretly worked with the NSA to subvert the security of Outlook, something it carefully denies. Even President Obama's justifications and denials are phrased with the intent that the listener will take his words very literally and not wonder what they really mean. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has claimed that the NSA's massive surveillance and data mining programs have helped stop more than 50 terrorist plots, 10 inside the U.S. Do you believe him? I think it depends on your definition of "helped." We're not told whether these programs were instrumental in foiling the plots or whether they just happened to be of minor help because the data was there. It also depends on your definition of "terrorist plots." An examination of plots that that FBI claims to have foiled since 9/11 reveals that would-be terrorists have commonly been delusional, and most have been egged on by FBI undercover agents or informants. Left alone, few were likely to have accomplished much of anything. Both government agencies and corporations have cloaked themselves in so much secrecy that it's impossible to verify anything they say; revelation after revelation demonstrates that they've been lying to us regularly and tell the truth only when there's no alternative. There's much more to come. Right now, the press has published only a tiny percentage of the documents Snowden took with him. And Snowden's files are only a tiny percentage of the number of secrets our government is keeping, awaiting the next whistle-blower. Ronald Reagan once said "trust but verify." That works only if we can verify. In a world where everyone lies to us all the time, we have no choice but to trust blindly, and we have no reason to believe that anyone is worthy of blind trust. It's no wonder that most people are ignoring the story; it's just too much cognitive dissonance to try to cope with it. This sort of thing can destroy our country. Trust is essential in our society. And if we can't trust either our government or the corporations that have intimate access into so much of our lives, society suffers. Study after study demonstrates the value of living in a high-trust society and the costs of living in a low-trust one. Rebuilding trust is not easy, as anyone who has betrayed or been betrayed by a friend or lover knows, but the path involves transparency, oversight and accountability. Transparency first involves coming clean. Not a little bit at a time, not only when you have to, but complete disclosure about everything. Then it involves continuing disclosure. No more secret rulings by secret courts about secret laws. No more secret programs whose costs and benefits remain hidden. Oversight involves meaningful constraints on the NSA, the FBI and others. This will be a combination of things: a court system that acts as a third-party advocate for the rule of law rather than a rubber-stamp organization, a legislature that understands what these organizations are doing and regularly debates requests for increased power, and vibrant public-sector watchdog groups that analyze and debate the government's actions. Accountability means that those who break the law, lie to Congress or deceive the American people are held accountable. The NSA has gone rogue, and while it's probably not possible to prosecute people for what they did under the enormous veil of secrecy it currently enjoys, we need to make it clear that this behavior will not be tolerated in the future. Accountability also means voting, which means voters need to know what our leaders are doing in our name. This is the only way we can restore trust. A market economy doesn't work unless consumers can make intelligent buying decisions based on accurate product information. That's why we have agencies like the FDA, truth-in-packaging laws and prohibitions against false advertising. In the same way, democracy can't work unless voters know what the government is doing in their name. That's why we have open-government laws. Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society. Since the Snowden documents became public, I have been receiving e-mails from people seeking advice on whom to trust. As a security and privacy expert, I'm expected to know which companies protect their users' privacy and which encryption programs the NSA can't break. The truth is, I have no idea. No one outside the classified government world does. I tell people that they have no choice but to decide whom they trust and to then trust them as a matter of faith. It's a lousy answer, but until our government starts down the path of regaining our trust, it's the only thing we can do. This essay originally appeared on CNN.com. http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/opinion/... Skype story: http://blogs.skype.com/2012/07/26/... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19012415 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/... http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/12/... Clapper story: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/... http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/... Government lies: http://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames How NSA sniffers actually work: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/06/11/... Published reports of NSA surveillance requests: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers Microsoft Outlook story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/... http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/... General Alexander's justification: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/... Examining terrorist plots: http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/... The value of trust: http://www.schneier.com/essay-412.html http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org Two more links describing how the US government lies about NSA surveillance. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/... https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/nsa-claims ---- News A problem with the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/... Interesting essay on the impossibility of being entirely lawful all the time, the balance that results from the difficulty of law enforcement, and the societal value of being able to break the law. It is very much like my notion of "outliers" in my book "Liars and Outliers." http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/... Good article on the longstanding practice of secretly tapping undersea cables. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/... This is news right now because of a new Snowden document. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/... An amazing e-mail from the DHS, instructing its employees not to read Snowden's documents when they appear in the press. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/... Edward Snowden has set up a dead man's switch. He's distributed encrypted copies of his document trove to various people, and has set up some sort of automatic system to distribute the key, should something happen to him. Dead man's switches have a long history, both for safety (the machinery automatically stops if the operator's hand goes slack) and security reasons. WikiLeaks did the same thing with the State Department cables. I'm not sure he's thought this through, though. I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. Any real-world situation involves multiple adversaries, and it's important to keep all of them in mind when designing a security system. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/... For a change, here's a good idea by the TSA: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/... Violence as a source of trust in criminal societies: http://themonkeycage.org/2013/07/11/... http://rss.sagepub.com/content/25/3/263.abstract I generally don't like stories about Snowden as a person, because they distract from the real story of the NSA surveillance programs, but this article on the costs and benefits of the US government prosecuting Edward Snowden is worth reading. http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/07/... Related is this article on whether Snowden can manage to avoid arrest. Here's the ending: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/12/us/... Marc Rotenberg of EPIC explains why he is suing the NSA in the Supreme Court. http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/17/opinion/... And "USA Today" has a back and forth on the topic. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/18/... http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/07/18/... This is a succinct explanation of how the secrecy of the FISA court undermines trust. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/... In an effort to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped, the NSA is implementing two-man control for sysadmins. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57594486/... This kind of thing has happened before. After USN Chief Warrant Officer John Walker sold encryption keys to the Soviets, the Navy implemented two-man control for key material. It's an effective, if expensive, security measure--and an easy one for the NSA to implement while it figures out what it really has to do to secure information from IT insiders. The story of people who poach and collect rare eggs, and the people who hunt them down. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/22/... Securing wildlife against poachers is a difficult problem, especially when the defenders are poor countries with not a lot of resources. We're starting to see Internet companies talk about the mechanics of how the US government spies on their users. Here, a Utah ISP owner describes his experiences with NSA eavesdropping: http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/... Declan McCullagh explains how the NSA coerces companies to cooperate with its surveillance efforts. Basically, they want to avoid what happened with the Utah ISP. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57593538-38/... And Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive explains how he successfully fought a National Security Letter. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/... Secret information is more trusted: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/... Original paper abstract: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... NSA cracked the Kryptos Sculpture (parts one, two, and three) years before the CIA did. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/... The fourth part is still uncracked. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/... http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/... The Obama Administration has a comprehensive "insider threat" program to detect leakers from within government. This is pre-Snowden. Not surprisingly, the combination of profiling and "see something, say something" is unlikely to work. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/... http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/09/196211/... http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/... This is a really clever social engineering attack against a bank-card holder. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2013/jul/29/... Research on why some neighborhoods feel safer. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/... http://www.plosone.org/article/... I've written about the feeling and reality of security, and how they're different. https://www.schneier.com/essay-213.html https://www.schneier.com/essay-170.html That's also the subject of this TEDx talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier.html Yes, it's security theater: things that make a neighborhood *feel* safer rather than actually safer. But when the neighborhood is actually safer than people think it is, this sort of security theater has value. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/... Two related links: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/... http://blogsofwar.com/2013/05/01/... This is what happens when you're a security writer and you piss off the wrong people: they conspire to have heroin mailed to you, and then to tip off the police. And that's after they've called in a fake hostage situation. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/... The UK has banned researchers from revealing details of security vulnerabilities in car locks. In 2008, Phillips brought a similar suit against researchers who broke the Mifare chip. That time, they lost. This time, Volkswagen sued and won. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/26/... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10205983/... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23487928 http://news.techworld.com/security/3461155/... http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2013/1832.html This is bad news for security researchers. (Remember back in 2001 when security researcher Ed Felten sued the RIAA in the US to be able to publish his research results?) We're not going to improve security unless we're allowed to publish our results. And we can't start suppressing scientific results, just because a big corporation doesn't like what it does to their reputation. Richard Bejtlich and Thomas Rid (author of the excellent book "Cyber War Will Not Take Place") debate the cyberwar threat on "The Economist" website. http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/256 There was a story about how searching for a pressure cooker and backpacks got one family investigated by the police. It was initially reported as NSA eavesdropping, but it wasn't. And as more of the facts came out, it seemed pretty reasonable overall. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/... The "Guardian" discusses a new secret NSA program: XKeyscore. It's the desktop system that allows NSA agents to spy on anyone over the Internet in real time. It searches existing NSA databases-- presumably including PRISM--and can create fingerprints to search for all future data collections from systems like TRAFFIC THIEF. This seems to be what Edward Snowden meant when he said that he had the ability to spy on any American, in real time, from his deck. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/... There's speculation that the FBI is responsible for an exploit that compromised the Tor anonymity service. Note that Tor Browser Bundles installed or updated after June 26 are secure. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/... https://openwatch.net/i/200/... http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rlo0uu http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/... http://www.metafilter.com/130629/... https://blog.torproject.org/blog/... The further Kip Hawley has gotten from running the TSA, the more sense he has started to make. This is pretty good. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/opinion/hawley-tsa/... Twitter just rolled out a pretty nice two-factor authentication system using your smart phone as the second factor. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/... Latest movie-plot threat: explosive-dipped clothing. It's being reported, although there's no indication of where this rumor is coming from or what it's based on. I can see the trailer now. "In a world where your very clothes might explode at any moment, Bruce Willis is, Bruce Willis in a Michael Bay film: BLOW UP! Co-starring Lindsay Lohan..." I guess there's nothing to be done but to force everyone to fly naked. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/... Lots of sports stadiums have instituted draconian new rules. Here are the rules for St. Louis Rams games. http://blog.stlouisrams.com/2013/06/13/... Of course, you're supposed to think this is about terrorism. My guess is that this is to help protect the security of the profits at the concession stands. General Keith Alexander thinks he can improve security by automating sysadmin duties such that 90% of them can be fired. Does anyone know a sysadmin anywhere who believes it's possible to automate 90% of his job? Or who thinks any such automation will actually improve security? He's stuck. Computerized systems require trusted people to administer them. And any agency with all that computing power is going to need thousands of sysadmins. Some of them are going to be whistleblowers. http://www.businessinsider.com/... Leaking secret information is the civil disobedience of our age. Alexander has to get used to it. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/07/... The 2013 Cryptologic History Symposium, sponsored by the NSA, will be held at Johns Hopkins University this October. http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/... Rangzen looks like a really interesting ad hoc mesh networking system to circumvent government-imposed communications blackouts. I am particularly interested in how it uses reputation to determine who can be trusted, while maintaining some level of anonymity. http://rangzen.denovogroup.org/wp/ http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/... This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about in this essay. https://www.schneier.com/essay-420.html This essay is filled with historical MI5 stories--often bizarre, sometimes amusing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER ---- Book Review: "Rise of the Warrior Cop" "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces," by Radley Balko, PublicAffairs, 2013, 400 pages. War as a rhetorical concept is firmly embedded in American culture. Over the past several decades, federal and local law enforcement has been enlisted in a war on crime, a war on drugs and a war on terror. These wars are more than just metaphors designed to rally public support and secure budget appropriations. They change the way we think about what the police do. Wars mean shooting first and asking questions later. Wars require military tactics and weaponry. Wars mean civilian casualties. Over the decades, the war metaphor has resulted in drastic changes in the way the police operate. At both federal and state levels, the formerly hard line between police and military has blurred. Police are increasingly using military weaponry, employing military tactics and framing their mission using military terminology. Right now, there is a Third Amendment case--that's the one about quartering soldiers in private homes without consent--making its way through the courts. It involves someone who refused to allow the police to occupy his home in order to gain a "tactical advantage" against the house next-door. The police returned later, broke down his door, forced him to the floor and then arrested him for obstructing an officer. They also shot his dog with pepperball rounds. It's hard to argue with the premise of this case; police officers are acting so much like soldiers that it can be hard to tell the difference. In "Rise of the Warrior Cop," Radley Balko chronicles the steady militarization of the police in the U.S. A detailed history of a dangerous trend, Mr. Balko's book tracks police militarization over the past 50 years, a period that not coincidentally corresponds with the rise of SWAT teams. First established in response to the armed riots of the late 1960s, they were originally exclusive to big cities and deployed only against heavily armed and dangerous criminals. Today SWAT teams are nothing special. They've multiplied like mushrooms. Every city has a SWAT team; 80% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people do as well. These teams are busy; in 2005 there were between 50,000 and 60,000 SWAT raids in the U.S. The tactics are pretty much what you would expect--breaking down doors, rushing in with military weaponry, tear gas--but the targets aren't. SWAT teams are routinely deployed against illegal poker games, businesses suspected of employing illegal immigrants and barbershops with unlicensed hair stylists. In Prince George's County, MD, alone, SWAT teams were deployed about once a day in 2009, overwhelmingly to serve search or arrest warrants, and half of those warrants were for "misdemeanors and nonserious felonies." Much of Mr. Balko's data is approximate, because police departments don't publish data, and they uniformly oppose any attempts at transparency or oversight. But he has good Maryland data from 2009 on, because after the mayor of Berwyn Heights was mistakenly attacked and terrorized in his home by a SWAT team in 2008, the state passed a law requiring police to report quarterly on their use of SWAT teams: how many times, for what purposes and whether any shots were fired during the raids. Besides documenting policy decisions at the federal and state levels, the author examines the influence of military contractors who have looked to expand into new markets. And he tells some pretty horrific stories of SWAT raids gone wrong. A lot of dogs get shot in the book. Most interesting are the changing attitudes of police. As the stories progress from the 1960s to the 2000s, we see police shift from being uncomfortable with military weapons and tactics-- and deploying them only as the very last resort in the most extreme circumstances--to accepting and even embracing their routine use. This development coincides with the rhetorical use of the word "war." To the police, civilians are citizens to protect. To the military, we are a population to be subdued. Wars can temporarily override the Constitution. When the Justice Department walks into Congress with requests for money and new laws to fight a war, it is going to get a different response than if it came in with a story about fighting crime. Maybe the most chilling quotation in the book is from William French Smith, President Reagan's first attorney general: "The Justice Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of national defense." Today we see that attitude in the war on terror. Because it's a war, we can arrest and imprison Americans indefinitely without charges. We can eavesdrop on the communications of all Americans without probable cause. We can assassinate American citizens without due process. We can have secret courts issuing secret rulings about secret laws. The militarization of the police is just one aspect of an increasing militarization of government. Mr. Balko saves his prescriptions for reform until the last chapter. Two of his fixes, transparency and accountability, are good remedies for all governmental overreach. Specific to police departments, he also recommends halting mission creep, changing police culture and embracing community policing. These are far easier said than done. His final fix is ending the war on drugs, the source of much police violence. To this I would add ending the war on terror, another rhetorical war that costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, gives law enforcement powers directly prohibited by the Constitution and leaves us no safer. This essay originally appeared in the "Wall Street Journal." http://online.wsj.com/article/... http://www.amazon.com/... Related essay. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/... ---- Schneier News My blog has made the "Time" magazine "25 Best Bloggers 2013 Edition" list. http://techland.time.com/2013/08/05/... Good review of the strengths and weaknesses of "Cryptography Engineering" and "Applied Cryptography." Best--at least to me-- is the list of things missing, which we'll have to address if we do another edition. http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/... Mikko Hypponen and I answered questions about PRISM on the TED website. http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/17/... ---- Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing Former NSA director Michael Hayden lists three effects of the Snowden documents: * "...the undeniable operational effect of informing adversaries of American intelligence's tactics, techniques and procedures." * "...the undeniable economic punishment that will be inflicted on American businesses for simply complying with American law." * "...the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do *anything* discreetly or keep *anything* secret." It's an interesting list, and one that you'd expect from a NSA person. Actually, the whole essay is about what you'd expect from a former NSA person. My reactions: * This, I agree, is actual damage. From what I can tell, Snowden has done his best to minimize it. And both the Guardian and the Washington Post refused to publish materials he provided, out of concern for US national security. Hayden believes that both the Chinese and the Russians have Snowden's entire trove of documents, but I'm less convinced. Everyone is acting under the assumption that the NSA has compromised everything, which is probably a good assumption. * Hayden has it backwards--this is good. I hope that companies that have cooperated with the NSA are penalized in the market. If we are to expect the market to solve any of this, we need the cost of cooperating to be greater than the cost of fighting. If we as consumers punish companies that have complied with the NSA, they'll be less likely to roll over next time. * In the long run, this might turn out to be a good thing, too. In the Internet age, secrecy is a lot harder to maintain. The countries that figure this out first will be the countries that do well in the coming decades. And, of course, Hayden lists his "costs" without discussing the benefits. Exposing secret government overreach, a secret agency gone rogue, and a secret court that's failing in its duties are enormously beneficial. Snowden has blown a whistle that long needed blowing--it's the only way can ever hope to fix this. And Hayden completely ignores the very real question as to whether these enormous NSA data-collection programs provide any real benefits. I'm also tired of this argument: "But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers." It's like President Obama claiming that the NSA programs are "transparent" because they were cleared by a secret court that only ever sees one side of the argument, or that Congress has provided oversight because a few legislators were allowed to know some of what was going on but forbidden from talking to *anyone* about it. http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/19/opinion/... The NSA has gone rogue: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/... NSA surveillance cost/benefits: https://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/06/13/... Obama's comments on NSA transparency: http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/06/18/... ---- Counterterrorism Mission Creep One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism. Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists. The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism--and remain in jail. Meanwhile, a Tennessee government official claimed that complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism. To the government's credit, he was subsequently demoted for those remarks. The notion of making a terrorist threat is older than the current spate of anti-terrorism craziness. It basically means threatening people in order to terrorize them, and can include things like pointing a fake gun at someone, threatening to set off a bomb, and so on. A Texas high-school student recently spent five months in jail for writing the following on Facebook: "I think I'ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them." Last year, two Irish tourists were denied entry at the Los Angeles Airport because of some misunderstood tweets. Another term that's expanded in meaning is "weapon of mass destruction." The law is surprisingly broad, and includes anything that explodes, leading political scientist and terrorism-fear skeptic John Mueller to comment: As I understand it, not only is a grenade a weapon of mass destruction, but so is a maliciously-designed child's rocket even if it doesn't have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the secretary of the army .... All artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter, legally qualifies as a WMD. It does make the bombardment of Ft. Sumter all the more sinister. To say nothing of the revelation that The Star Spangled Banner is in fact an account of a WMD attack on American shores. After the Boston Marathon bombings, one commentator described our use of the term this way: "What the United States means by terrorist violence is, in large part, 'public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.' ... Mass murderers who strike with guns (and who don't happen to be Muslim) are typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political sphere." Sadly, there's a lot of truth to that. Even as the definition of terrorism broadens, we have to ask how far we will extend that arbitrary line. Already, we're using these surveillance systems in other areas. A raft of secret court rulings has recently expanded the NSA's eavesdropping powers to include "people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks." A "little-noticed provision" in a 2008 law expanded the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," which, as we've just seen, is surprisingly broad. A recent "Atlantic" essay asks, somewhat facetiously, "If PRISM is so good, why stop with terrorism?" The author's point was to discuss the value of the Fourth Amendment, even if it makes the police less efficient. But it's actually a very good question. Once the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance of all Americans is complete--once it has the ability to collect and process all of our emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, location data, physical mail, financial transactions, and who knows what else--why limit its use to cases of terrorism? I can easily imagine a public groundswell of support to use to help solve some other heinous crime, like a kidnapping. Or maybe a child-pornography case. From there, it's an easy step to enlist NSA surveillance in the continuing war on drugs; that's certainly important enough to warrant regular access to the NSA's databases. Or maybe to identify illegal immigrants. After all, we've already invested in this system, we might as well get as much out of it as we possibly can. Then it's a short jump to the trivial examples suggested in the "Atlantic" essay: speeding and illegal downloading. This "slippery slope" argument is largely speculative, but we've already started down that incline. Criminal defendants are starting to demand access to the NSA data that they believe will exonerate themselves. How can a moral government refuse this request? More humorously, the NSA might have created the best backup system ever. Technology changes slowly, but political intentions can change very quickly. In 2000, I wrote in my book "Secrets and Lies" about police surveillance technologies: "Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." Today we're installing technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, and the temptation to use them will be overwhelming. This essay originally appeared in TheAtlantic.com. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/... The definition of terrorism has broadened: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/... The anti-nuclear pacifists: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7 Tennessee official story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/22/... http://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2013/jul/4/... Texas high-school student story: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/... Irish tourist story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16810312 "Weapon of mass destruction" story: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332a Mueller comment: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/... Quote about what a terrorist is: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/... Secret court rulings on NSA power: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/... Atlantic article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/... Other agencies are already asking to use the NSA data: "Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agencys vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/us/... The Drug Enforcement Agency is already using this data, and lying about it: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/... Defendants demanding NSA data: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/... http://rt.com/usa/nsa-surveillance-judge-records-900/ NSA as a backup system: http://nesaranews.blogspot.com/2013/07/... Ubiquitous surveillance: https://www.schneier.com/essay-418.html ---- Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL. Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety. CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist. He is the author of 12 books--including "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive"-- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and his blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Security Futurologist for BT--formerly British Telecom. See <http://www.schneier.com>. Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT. _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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